Derek Laney switches to Slack

He has been a stalwart of the Australian marketing technology sector for 15 years at Salesforce, but now Derek Laney is undergoing his own career transformation, albeit within the company.

Laney revealed this week that he has moved to collaboration platform Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2020 for $US27.7 billion where he will take on the role of Technology Evangelist.

He started at Salesforce in 2007 as a principal solutions engineer and eventually became the company's senior director of product marketing - and one of the best-known executives in the local marketing technology community at a time when martech emerged as a crucial platform for customer experience transformation.

Indeed, with this move, he is likely the last of the original martech evangelists in Australia, a market that was dominated over the last decade by companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and for a brief while, Oracle. 

Laney announced the change this week, writing on Linkedin, "Today is my last day working with Service Cloud and the Salesforce marketing team and I can't think of a better way to spend it than with amazing friends and customers that have become my work family over the last 10 years in marketing #futureofwork. On Monday I begin a new purpose to help customers find opportunity, joy and purpose in the future of work at Slack."